The present invention generally relates to removable storage devices for electronic information. More particular, the present invention relates to enhancing data storage capacity by improving the accuracy of data storage and retrieval.
Consumer electronics including television sets, personal computers, and stereo or audio systems, have changed dramatically since their availability. Television was originally used as a stand alone unit in the early 1900's, but has now been integrated with audio equipment to provide video with high quality sound in stereo. For instance, a television set can have a high quality display coupled to an audio system with stereo or even "surround sound" or the like. This integration of television and audio equipment provides a user with a high quality video display for an action movie such as STARWARS.TM. with "lifelike" sound from the high quality stereo or surround sound system. Accordingly, the clash between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader can now be seen as well as heard in surround sound on your own home entertainment center. In the mid-1990's, computer-like functions became available on a conventional television set. Companies such as WebTV of California provide what is commonly termed as "Internet" access to a television set. The Internet is a world wide network of computers, which can now be accessed through a conventional television set at a user location. Numerous displays or "wet sites" exist on the Internet for viewing and even ordering goods and services at the convenience of home, where the act of indexing through websites is known as "surfing" the web. Accordingly, users of WebTV can surf the Internet or web using a home entertainment center.
As merely an example, FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional audio and video configuration, commonly termed a home entertainment system, which can have Internet access. FIG. 1 is generally a typical home entertainment system, which includes a video display 10 (e.g., television set), an audio output 20, an audio processor 30, a video display processor 40, and a plurality of audio or video data sources 50. Consumers have often been eager to store and play back pre-recorded audio (e.g., songs, music) or video using a home entertainment system. Most recently, consumers would like to also store and retrieve information, commonly termed computer data, downloaded from the Internet.
Music or audio have been traditionally recorded on many types of systems using different types of media to provide audio signals to home entertainment systems. For example, these audio systems include a reel to reel system 140, using magnetic recording tape, an eight track player 120, which uses eight track tapes, a phonograph 130, which uses LP vinyl records, and an audio cassette recorder 110, which relies upon audio cassettes. Optical storage media also have been recognized as providing convenient and high quality audio play-back of music, for example. Optical storage media exclusively for sound include a digital audio tape 90 and a compact disk 10. Unfortunately, these audio systems generally do not have enough memory or capacity to store both video and audio to store movies or the like. Tapes also have not generally been used to efficiently store and retrieve information from a personal computer since tapes are extremely slow and cumbersome.
Audio and video have been recorded together for movies using a video tape or video cassette recorder, which relies upon tapes stored on cassettes. Video cassettes can be found at the local Blockbuster.TM. store, which often have numerous different movies to be viewed and enjoyed by the user. Unfortunately, these tapes are often too slow and clumsy to store and easily retrieve computer information from a personal computer. Additional video and audio media include a laser disk 70 and a digital video disk 60, which also suffer from being read only, and cannot be easily used to record a video at the user site. Furthermore, standards for a digital video disk have not been established of the filing date of this patent application and do not seem to be readily establishable in the future.
From the above, it is desirable to have a storage media that can be used for all types of information such as audio, video, and digital data, which have features such as a high storage capacity, expandability, and quick access capabilities.
The present invention relates to storage media that utilizes magneto-resistive head (MR read/write head) technology. One benefit to MR head technology is the reduction in amount of data overhead from removing data ID fields from data sectors on the disk. Magnetic disks without such ID fields are termed "headerless ID" magnetic disks.
In order to locate MR heads over particular locations on a magnetic disk, servo wedge bursts are provided that include positional data such as positional burst patterns, logical cylinder numbers (track number or servo track number), sector numbers, and other header data. Typical logical cylinder numbers, sector numbers, and the like are the same width as typical data tracks. Further, typical positional burst patterns include a quadrature pattern (A,B,C, and D), each which are from two-thirds to the same width as typical data tracks. Based upon the servo track number, sector number, intensity of signals of A, B, C, and D, and the like, most positions of the MR head relative to the magnetic disk are typically determined.
Drawbacks to these current approaches include that they have limited upward compatibility with higher resolution (smaller) MR read/write heads. Since current physical sizes of the positional burst patterns, servo track number, etc. are large compared to higher resolution MR read/write heads, locating MR head relative to current magnetic disks is more difficult.
What is required is a method and apparatus for increasing the positional accuracy of MR heads on a magnetic disk.